Saturday, April 07, 2007

Liveblog! Doing taxes at (almost) the last minute

This may be a first. If not, there are some sick *ucks out there.

As small businesspersyns with a variety of income streams (trickles) (dry washes) our methods of document organization have to be exacting. During the year, every scrap of paper that has anything to do with taxes, we throw in a cardboard box. Sometimes the papers hit the box exactly. Most of the time, not. It works okay.

10:00 a.m.: We've dumped out the box. There's mouse poop in the bottom. Josie eats the mouse poop. (Update: Josie is a dog).

We go through all the papers, separating out the necessary from the un. D-a-W prints out last year's return for us to go by. We use TaxACT, which should let us file electronically, but has never quite worked.

10:28: We've made one big pile of paper into several smaller piles. Progress! Time for breakfast. There's a new place in Edgewater. Woo-hoo. Back sometime.

11:50: Nice place, sort of coffee-shoppish. Wi-fi. We sat on a couch by the window, looking out on the liquor store across the street. Good variety of old soaks buying their weekend supplies. We compared our physical deterioration to theirs, generally favorably.

12:00 p.m: Okay, we need to use the laptop for inputting. We've also got Charlotte's Web on the DVD player. Got some hellacious liveblog going here. Back later.

2:20 p.m.: I cried only a little when Charlotte was dying. Some Pig!

2:38: Got my part of things done. Now to pawn the laptop!

Oh yeah, I'm liveblogging. But my God we're poor.

Now we've got The Secret playing on DVD. Don't tell the D-a-W, but, blehhh. Hoke. Um. With a little common sense thrown in. These guys have great job titles: Bob Doyle, Author; Dr. Joe Vitale, MSC.D (Doctor of Metaphysical Science), Metaphysician; and my favorite, the Rev. Dr. Michael Beckwith, D.D., Visionary. Hey, since The Secret is all about changing your thinking, I am now the Rev. Dr. Michael Beckwith, Visionary. Minus the dreads.

Oh, forget it. I'd have to change all my business cards. And my racial orientation. I'll just settle for a new car.

4:10 p.m.: Boy, this sucks. Not the tax preparation, the live-blog.

As for the taxes, we're getting there, but our debentures keep getting in the way of our amortizations. Hey, Morty!

Now we've got something called Blue Butterfly on the DVD. Kid who's dying goes to Costa Rica with William Hurt to hunt walla--kidding!--to hunt the rare blue butterfly. What happened to William Hurt's hair? They should be hunting for that instead. He should join the Hair Club for Growth.

I've been wanting to work that into a post for weeks: The Hair Club for Growth.

Uh-oh. Just when this was getting fascinating [sic], I have to input more numbers. Back lamer.

1:48 a.m.: Well that worked out just great. We had an outage until just a few minutes ago, so there went the liveblogging. You don't know what you missed.